The power company that got nailed with the $30 billion (or whatever it was) judgment for possibly causing a huge destructive fire is publicly traded. This matters because if shareholders had to eat that loss, it would destroy the valuation of the company and stock would plummet. Execs and board of directors get a lot of pay as stock and options, so cratering the stock isn't acceptable. So instead they passed the loss onto ratepayers i.e. innocent customers have a surcharge for decades to pay for a fire caused by utility negligence (and whether the utility did in fact cause the fire was never proven one way or the other, but it's easy to create a villain for juries to blame). We need to get a grip on our insignificance compared to natural forces. Wildfires are as inevitable as hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, etc. Humans can't stop them, but we can be prepared to flee and/or adapt to the resulting changes to the environment. Humans dominate Earth because we make plans and we adapt to whatever the planet throws at us.
The company, PG+E, went bankrupt. The shareholders did eat a big loss. They might still be incompetent but it’s not like they’re making huge profits off this shutdown.
